Monday, January 22, 2018

You might not want to, but you probably remember the Bush
administration’s Neo-Wilsonian democracy agenda. Considering how badly the
Wilson administration did in its effort to make the world safe for democracy,
you would expect future presidents to offer a different approach to foreign
policy. And yet, bad ideas and specious ideals die hard… especially when
implemented by people who lack basic competence.

You probably also remember the Common Core education program
promoted by a High Tech billionaire who knew nothing about pedagogy and the
Obama administration. Today, we are happy to report, the Trump Education
Department just declared that Common Core has failed. It is officially dead.

Among the non-innovations coming to us from Common Core was
the Platonic idea that authoritarian teaching methods are bad. In the Meno Socrates allowed his pupil to
believe that he could learn geometry without it being taught, that is, without
having to take it on anyone’s authority. It’s an enticing notion: you possess
all knowledge but do not know that you possess it. Your teacher will help you
to discover what you already know, and you will accept it unquestioningly because it was not imposed
on you by any higher authority.

You might not want to think that this pedagogical technique
contains the germs of democratic governance, but it is certainly more
democratic than the authoritarian mode, practiced previously in America and
currently practiced in the Far East.

In a Chinese classroom, the teacher’s authority is absolute
can never be questioned. You might imagine that students who respect such
authority are better behaved and you would probably be correct. Too many
American schoolchildren are so undisciplined that they cannot learn anything.
Moreover, as studies have suggested, it is easier to learn math and science by
having the teacher teach it than to have students pretend that they can figure
it out themselves. In the authoritarian classroom, children are told the rules,
they memorize the tables, and they are drilled until they master the technique.

As it happens, said students generally outperform their
American peers, but such is life. American pedagogues will retort that the
Chinese authoritarian method produces robotic children who cannot think
creatively. In the language of the tech world, such children will never be able
to innovate.

Within this frame we report on a new study of technological
innovation. The news, as Robert Samuelson reports in the Washington Post, is
not good for us:

The
National Science Foundation and the National Science Board have just released
their biennial “Science & Engineering Indicators,” a voluminous
document describing the state of American technology. There are facts and
figures on research and development, innovation and engineers. But the report’s
main conclusion lies elsewhere: China has become — or is on the verge of
becoming — a scientific and technical superpower.

We
should have expected nothing less. After all, science and technology constitute
the knowledge base for economically advanced societies and military powers, and
China aspires to become the world leader in both. Still, the actual numbers are
breathtaking for the speed with which they’ve been realized.

We will console ourselves with the thought that we are still
No. 1, but China is fast catching up. Uh, oh.

In several areas:

China
has become the second- largest R&D spender, accounting for 21percent
of the world total of nearly $2 trillion in 2015. Only the United States, at 26
percent, ranks higher, but if present growth rates continue, China will soon
become the biggest spender. From 2000 to 2015, Chinese R&D outlays grew an
average of 18 percent annually, more than four times faster than the U.S. rate
of 4 percent.

There
has been an explosion of technical papers by Chinese teams. Although the United
States and the European Union each produce more studies on biomedical subjects,
China leads in engineering studies. American papers tend to be cited more often
than the Chinese papers , suggesting that they involve more fundamental
research questions, but China is catching up.

The key is not that China has overtaken us, but that China,
for having been significantly behind us, is gaining significant ground.

Why is this a problem? Samuelson answers:

One
danger is military. If China makes a breakthrough in a crucial technology —
satellites, missiles, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, electromagnetic
weapons — the result could be a major shift in the strategic balance and,
possibly, war.

Even if
this doesn’t happen, warns the commission, China’s determination to dominate new
industries such as artificial intelligence, telecommunications and computers
could lead to economic warfare if China maintains subsidies and discriminatory
policies to sustain its firms’ competitive advantage.

“Industries
like computing, robotics, and biotechnology are pillars of U.S. economic
competitiveness, sustaining and creating millions of high-paying jobs and
high-value-added exports,” the commission said in its latest annual report. “The loss of
global leadership in these future drivers of global growth” would weaken the American
economy. Chinese theft of U.S. industrial trade secrets compounds the danger.

How can we catch up? Perhaps if Silicon Valley was not
torturing its collective soul over diversity it could focus more intently on
innovation. Not because it does not innovate, but because it could do better.

Samuelson adds that we should overhaul our immigration
system in order to make it more merit-based. We should accept fewer relatives
of current immigrants and focus on admitting those who have a higher skill
level. Where have we heard that before?

Call it a wake-up call. Strangely, it coincides with a story
in today’s Wall Street Journal. Chinese high tech innovators recently visited
Silicon Valley. Their reaction will surprise you. It surprised me:

Silicon
Valley has loomed large in China’s tech world in the past two decades. China’s
internet industry started by copying Silicon Valley technologies and business
models. That’s why there’s the Google of China ( Baidu Inc. ), the Uber of China
(Didi Chuxing Technology Co.) and the Groupon of
China (Meituan-Dianping). Some of the biggest Chinese internet companies, such
as e-commerce giant Alibaba Group
Holding Ltd. , were funded by Silicon Valley money. Translations
of best-selling books by Silicon Valley sages, such as “Zero to One” by Peter
Thiel and “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz, became instant
best sellers in China too….

But for
most of the 18 entrepreneurs and investors, and especially for those in their
20s and 30s, last week’s visit largely failed to impress. To many in the group,
northern California’s low-rise buildings looked shabbier than the glitzy
skyscrapers in Beijing and Shenzhen. They can’t believe Americans still use
credit cards and cash while they
use mobile payment for almost everything back home, including settling bets
for their Texas Hold’em games one night in Palo Alto.

As
China’s internet industry has grown larger and its companies have become more
competitive and confident, Silicon Valley’s allure is fading.

14 comments:

I've always felt memorization and drills were a way to free your mind to focus energy on more advanced problems as you were exposed to them. The less mental energy you need to expend performing basic arithmetic gives you more to focus on performing and understanding more complex equations and procedures.

I wrote about Thinking and Memorizing quite a few years ago....will repost here to spare your clicking finger:

Jakob Dylan has a song that includes the following lines:

Cupid, don't draw back your bowSam Cooke didn't know what I know

Think of how much you need to know in order to understand these two simple lines:

1)You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love2)And that Cupid's chosen instrument is the bow and arrow3)Also that there was a singer/songwriter named Sam Cooke4)And that he had a song called which included the lines "Cupid, draw back your bow."

(This is actually a post about education, not about music.)

"Progressive" educators, loudly and in large numbers, insist that students should be taught "thinking skills" as opposed to memorization. But consider: If it's not possible to understand a couple of lines from a popular song without knowing by heart the references to which it alludes--without memorizing them--what chance is there for understanding medieval history, or modern physics, without having a ready grasp of the topics which these disciplines reference?

And also consider: in the Dylan case, it's not just what you need to know to appreciate the song. It's what Dylan needed to know to create it in the first place. Had he not already had the reference points--Cupid, the bow and arrow, the Sam Cooke song--in his head, there's no way he would have been able to create his own lines. The idea that he could have just "looked them up," which educators often suggest is the way to deal with factual knowledge, would be ludicrous in this context. And it would also be ludicrous in the context of creating new ideas about history or physics. To use a computer analogy, the things you know aren't just data--they're part of the program.

I've seen no evidence that there exists a known body of "thinking skills" so powerful that they bypass the need for detailed, substantative knowledge within specific disciplines. And if such meta-level thinking skills were to be developed, I suspect that the last place to find them would be in university Education departments.

There are skills which facilitate thinking across a wide range of disciplines: such things as formal logic, probability & statistics, and an understanding of the scientific method--and, most importantly, excellent reading skills. But things like these certainly don't seem to be what the educators are referring to when they talk about "thinking skills." What many of them seem to have in mind is more of a kind of verbal mush that leaves the student with nothing to build on.

There's no substitute for actual knowledge. The flip response "he can always look it up" is irresponsible and ignores the way that human intellectual activity actually works.

None of which is to say that traditional teaching practices were all good. There was probably too much emphasis on rote memorization devoid of context--in history, dates soon to be forgotten, in physics, formulae without proper understanding of their meaning and applicability. (Dylan needed to know about Sam Cooke's song; he didn't need to know the precise date on which it was written or first sung.) But the cure is to provide the context, not to throw out facts and knowledge altogether--which is what all too many educators seem eager to do.

@Christopher,In athletics I made my people practice the daylights out of the basics for that reason. My motto; "If you can do the normal without thinking, then the above normal is actually very close and easy".

Re/ the Jakob Dylan lines, it might be helpful to remember also that one of Sam Cooke's most famous songs is in the guise of a student who "don't know much" about various things, except that "I love you". Anyway, thanks for the reference, David Foster--it looks like I should learn something about Jakob D. And that is a reward for my recent morbid fascination with this blog, though I agree with so little here.

China's advantage might not just be that its authoritarian, but that a higher population country (4x larger) and so a higher individual competition for limited opportunities, and the single child families also encourage more children to excel.

Perhaps the answer is that public education has gotten too "soft", and democracy has been corrupted by weak feminine principles like "leave no child behind".

Perhaps having a 6th grade education is good enough for 50% of the population (they can be crop pickers or wall builders), and so if we're willing to sacrifice more youth of lower intelligence or lower motivation, perhaps we could do wonders in raising our school test scores, and get them into STEMS fields that will help save humanity from its own excesses created by our technical achievements?

And same with immigration. Why not take the best and brightest exchange students who are still willing to come here under president Trump and try to entice them to stay? I sort of thought we already did this, but maybe we need to do more?

I'd better start keeping up with my CSci studies before an immigrant comes in and takes my job because he's willing to work twice as well at half my pay. See? Look how fast productivity will increase when you add the right incentives?

Definitely, I remembered the speaker of the "don't know much" song wanted to be an A student to please his love interest. My point was simply that the web of associations in the Jakob Dylan song would seem to be even more complex than what those things you mentioned, probably encompassing the word "know" in the second Cooke song I brought up. But I'm into all kinds of old fashioned things like explicating texts, and depth psychology (as an amateur observer)